Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Small things bright and dark: A novella and stories
Abstract
SMALL THINGS BRIGHT AND DARK: A NOVELLA AND STORIES is a collection of sixteen stories—length and nine "flash fiction" pieces, each under 1,000 words—ending with a novella that uses the first-person narration of a former child actor (of horror film fame) to stitch together a variety of media, including, fictionalized Wikipedia entries, emails, press releases, and photographs. The stories and flash fictions predominately feature child and young-adult protagonists, the "small things" referenced in the title. Tonally, the stories are more dark than bright, although the play between light and shadow exists in the work and references the European and American fiction in the Gothic mode that influenced much of the writing. Specific influences include Shirley Jackson's novels featuring socially-disinclined (female) teenaged narrators, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Hangsaman, Julie Orringer's dark collection of stories How to Breathe Underwater, Henry James's unreliable governess and ill-fated children in The Turn of the Screw, and the fin-de-siècle Gothic horror fiction of Arthur Machen, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Robert Louis Stevenson.^
Subject Area
Literature, Comparative|Literature, American
Recommended Citation
Oleson, Wendy E, "Small things bright and dark: A novella and stories" (2014). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI3618688.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3618688